A Conversation with Gustavo Utrabo
Amin Taha
Amin Taha: Gustavo, we first met in 2018 when I visited your Children’s Village in Canuanã as a member of the RIBA jury, which awarded you the international prize that year. That was my first visit to Brazil, and perhaps inevitably, I wanted to understand your country’s architectural and broader culture, in particular, your work in that context. I was helped by my conversations with you and your friends. I remember that during one of them, I was fascinated to learn that the wife of one of your friends was still identified as ‘Japanese’, despite being a third-generation Brazilian, and that this kind of consideration was also applied by ‘Europeans’, who trace their ancestry back to the first colonists. That obviously struck me, due to my naivety I guess, and also my excessively infrequent visits to the Americas, but the impression I got was that deep down, legacies associated with tribal/cultural identities are still maintained.
Focusing on the architectural context, I was reminded of Marshall Berman’s visit to Brasilia as a guest lecturer and his impression, after perusing the city layout from the air as his plane landed, that its masterplan seemed to be an inflexible imposition which had little to do with modern ‘socialist’ ideals. His insinuation fell on hostile ears, and sparked a debate about whether the same built form could be associated with both right and left-wing ideologies, instead of being about whether planning and its associated architecture could perhaps be considered patriarchal, if not colonial, or whether it should be flexible and take its inhabitants into account. So, having learned something about your work, and thinking about your experience with distant rural communities, may I suggest that in Brazil, your generation is possibly the first one to move away from an uncritical Modernism?
Gustavo Utrabo: It’s interesting that you bring Brasilia and that comment by Marshall Berman into the conversation. I say that because both Canuanã, the project I had the pleasure to show you, and also the city of Brasilia, have a quite specific territorial condition in Brazil, not only in terms of their biomes, but also in terms of their geopolitical location and their historic occupation. For example, the recent development of Tocatins State (founded in 1988, which includes the location of the Children’s Village) is a response to the political will to occupy the country’s hinterland, an endeavour whose greatest exponent was the construction of Brasilia in the 1950s. This desire to look in the opposite direction from the sea is a recent force in Brazil’s history. After being tested with the transfer of the national capital to Brasilia, it received little implementation. The interesting thing about that transfer was that it brought about a change in the power-related aesthetics, from eclectic to modernism. Even so, in both cases, very little attention was paid to the pre-existing cultures, and that made any kind of occupation that was not connected to an image of progress unviable. Because of that approach and the scarce appreciation for any kind of pre-existence, the occupation of these territories has been, and still is, quite truculent and devastating. When you walk through these places, you immediately realise that the modernity that was expected on the Brazilian central plateau never happened (wide avenues cutting through immensities that are yet to be occupied) and that the result has been a vast, segregated, hard-to-access territory, in some cases doomed to failure, as Marshall Berman pointed out.
Regarding your question, I don’t know if I am part of the first generation of Brazilian architects to move away from an uncritical Modernism, but I can certainly say that because of my distance from that historical moment and also because of my training (les biased by certain dogmas), I feel freer to test other approaches, which I believe are essential in the light of the repeated architectural solutions that are still proposed here.
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